For my feed reading needs I used Gregarius hosted on my site for nearly three years. But the downside is that I can only update feeds manually. I guess I could do a crontab that does a request for the update page, but I spent three years being too lazy to get that done.

I’ve been using Google Reader for nearly two months now to try it out, and I decided to stick with it. It’s good, it’s free, and it has great options for sharing interesting stuff with my friends that also use it (all one of them). You can find my shared items here if you’re interested. Feed also available there. The occasional shared post in Swedish, but mostly English.

Interface-wise there’s one thing that confuses me though: Google Reader treats folders (for different feeds) and tags (for individual entries) the same. But not.

I exported all my feeds from Gregarius as OPML and imported them to Google Reader with my old categories preserved. Nothing fancy — I had categories like People, Tech, Design and so on.

After importing the OPML, Google Reader picked it up just fine. The problem is when I want to tag individual entries, something I typically do with stuff I want to keep around for later.

The problem: The names of what I think of as “folders” show up as tags when I tag individual entries. And it’s making my brain melt. Google, you got tags in my folders and folders in my tags!

Another problem is that the name of the folder a feed is in is always added as a default tag for all entries from that feed. Very annoying. I have a folder named “People”, and that’s a very poor tag for the items in it.